The Weeknd releases highly Anticipated Album: After hours

By Alexia Garcia El Rodeo Staff Writer

After Hours debuted on March 20th at the top of the Billboard album chart. On After Hours, his fourth studio album, The Weeknd returns to early-era Abel, as ever his voice remains disarmingly beautiful.

Though his lyrics can be a little skeletal and raw, there is a loose through-line here of becoming exasperated with California life. On “Escape From LA,” he lays out a taxonomy of a blurry type of foe: “L.A. girls all look the same, I can’t recognize/The same work done on the face, I don’t criticize.” Drugs, or the intimation of them, remain one of his inspirations in his songs. “I don’t wanna touch the sky no more/I just wanna feel the ground when I’m coming down,” he exhales on “Until I Bleed Out.”

The Weeknd draws his inspiration from the ecstatic pop of the 1980s, particularly Michael Jackson, a clear vocal influence. But the Weeknd also dabbles in abstraction, working with Oneohtrix Point Never and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Repeat After Me (Interlude).”

The rest of the album, though, doesn’t shy away from the Weeknd’s shimmery mid-80s luxuriance. The saxophone solo near the end of the satisfyingly electric “In Your Eyes”, and “Save Your Tears” has both tonal echoes of Depeche Mode’s melancholy and a nod to “Everything She Wants” by Wham! And then there’s “Blinding Lights,” currently the No. 1 song in the country, which sounds like it could have been lifted from a found Jazzercise tape from 1986, though the chilly synths. ​The song’s music video is appropriately traumatic, but on TikTok in recent days, the #blindinglightschallenge has been among the most wholesome of all viral dances.